Well Eugene, looking at your original statement you seem to be saying it beats the 7790 and the 7850.. (you added in the "as well as.." ) Anyway, no clue how the 2G 7790 does or how the 1G 650TIB does.. so it's all sorta moot. On paper if you ask me the 650 is the better card overall.Reply

Bundled games? HD7850 uses less power and overclocks better? AMD cuts the price of their cards way more resulting in better performance per dollar cards before Nvidia actually release one that could fight back?

It's true the GTX650ti Boost does seem pretty good for a newly released card in terms of performance per dollar but your question just shows a little bit "fanboyism".Reply

Overclocking is not a guarantee, apart from the fact that it shortens the lifespan of the card itself, all it does is increase power consumption (which negates your power consumption argument) and it also wastes your time by having to have to tinker with drivers and overclocking speeds to make sure the card doesn't artifact and such. Considering the subpar quality of AMD drivers, this is something that no one wants to waste their time on except for fans of AMD.Reply

So true, 7850 hits 1050 MHz easy breezy. It was a great card and it has held its value, I originally got it for $150 second hand when it first came out(forum shopping). I'm surprised to see it still being valued higher than that.

From my personal experience, the 7850 is a guaranteed 1 GHz card. But a lot of people don't OC so they miss out on the potential. Nvidia does have its positives and the boost seems like a good card to fill the holes in the market.Reply

I hear what you're saying -- in the past, people would say that you could overclock a model of card to some ridiculous speed that only 5% of the cards of that model could reach with stability, and then say that the entire model of card performed that way. A couple of times, I was tricked by this kind of nonsense, and regretted swallowing it from idiots on a chat forum.

But in the case of the 7850, this is the real deal. I kid you not, there is probably not a single one that won't go up to 1050MHz with just the AMD video driver and a couple of fisher-price sliders and not even any additional voltage. I defy you to find somebody who has tried this, and been unable to clock it up to at least the 1050MHz max in the video driver, without any extra volts. It's the best kept secret in the video card market right now, almost like the Celeron 300a back in the day, that would clock from 300MHz to 450MHz with just a multiplier adjustment in the bios. It's like AMD just left 40% more performance on the table with the 7850. I had two of them myself for about a week, and it was ridiculous how much faster they would go if you just bothered to take 2 minutes to bump them up from 860MHz to 1100MHz-1150MHz. I can picture AMD getting slightly irritated at nVidia for trying to reach the 7850's default speed with this piddly GTX650 Ti Boost, and turning around and releasing a GHz edition bios for all 7850 owners to just flash their cards to 1050MHz, kinda of like they did for the 7950.Reply

IMO The new card is good deal if I consider only gaming performance per price.However, as a distributed computing junkie, I would still recommend the participants to choose some RADEON HD 7k cards for double-precision workunits (HCC in WCG in particular).Reply

One simple and obvious answer, Never Settle Reloaded. The 7850 is faster in most games, destroys it compute, and you get Tomb Raider and BioShock Infinite for free. Even if you have no interest in either game, you can easily get ~$50 (after fees) for the codes on eBay. Nice 2GB 7850s have been on sale regularly for $170. That means you can get a faster 7850 2GB for ~$120. So does $150 for a 1GB 650 Ti Boost sound better than $120 for a 2GB 7850? 1GB 7850s have hit $150. Bottom line is that it's great time to be a budget gamer. The 650 Ti Boost, 7790, and 7850 are all good cards in the pricing sweet spot for a lot of people. Never Settle Reloaded puts things squarely in AMDs hands from a "value" perspective though. Whether or not you want the games, they are quick sells, and even the 7790 would really be in the ~$120 range if you wanted to sell BioShock Infinite.Reply

Thanks! Based on your post, I did a bit of shopping, and found an MSI 7870 @ Newegg. $220 list price minus a $25 rebate, ~$50 on reselling the bundle, and ~$30 on reselling my GTX 460, and I should be at about $115 for a 7870. Not too bad considering they were ~$350 at release.Reply

You just reminded me that I need to decide if I'm selling my GTX 460. I looked on eBay a few weeks ago and the same 1GB model sold for ~$60. Part of me thinks it isn't really worth it and I should just keep it as a backup or a hand-me-down upgrade for a family member. But the smarter part of me knows it will probably just sit in its box in my closet for years.Reply

I think you can get a bit more for the 460.. $60 is a fair price for it.. imo. Also "HIS" seems to offer the best deals on the 7870 (when they come up for sale..) Not sure if you can really get $50 for the bundle tho.. hah can always try!Reply

YMMV of course. However I've sold two for that much, with the listings lasting less than 12 hours. And most people are happy to just get the code via email so you might not even have to ship anything.Reply

This is probably the first Kepler part Nvidia has launched so far that actually comes off looking like a good value. It's probably where price:performance should've been a year ago, but it has taken nearly a full year for 28nm prices to trickle down to this point. Still, it's pretty amazing how much Nvidia has milked Kepler. They now have 7-8 SKUs (not counting OC variants) in this sub-$300 market based off of 3 ASICs (GK104, GK106, GK107). Reminds me of that Mickey Mouse cartoon where they keep slicing off razor thin pieces of bean. At least this part makes sense however and fills a pretty cavernous void in that $150-$200 range between the 660 and old 650Ti.

Valid point to be made however about the huge disparity in gaming bundles. AMD really is kicking Nvidia's teeth in with their gaming bundles of late. Nvidia's F2P bundle stinks compared to AMD's recent offerings of Crysis 3, Bioshock Infinity, Tomb Raider etc. In a $150-200 market where one can easily account for 1/3 to 1/4th of the sticker price as a hot AAA game, the perceived bundle value does matter. I'm sure it helped the 650Ti with AC3, but that card was a bit underperforming relative to even last-gen cards. The cards in the $150+ range are much better performers, actually providing tangible upgrades from most last-gen parts in this range (GTX 560, 6850 etc).Reply

Spot on about the huge disparity in the game bundles. In the last two months I've picked up a 2GB 7850 and two 7870s. Without Never Settle Reloaded I honestly probably wouldn't have bought any of them. Sold two of the bundles and kept one.Reply

Good card compared to the 7790 but the 7850 2 gb is still a better buy. The two games you get with it and the fact that if you overclock the 7850 is going to eat the 650 ti boost (the 650 ti boost does not have much overclocking room at over 1050 mhz vs the 860 of the 7850). Competes much better in the low end (1 gb) than with the higher end. Reply

WHY didn't they just drop the price of the GTX660 to like 170 MSRP? I mean, if they're just fusing off part of the card, their cost is the same, if not higher due to whatever labor is involved in fusing off that SMX. This, IMO is a card that shouldn't even exist. The GTX660 is priced far too high for the performance offered. Random FPS hickups or no, all my recommendations are AMD until Nvidia stops pricing themselves out of competition. This, coming from someone who was, for a long time, Nvidia only ever since I had 3 horrid experiences with ATI in a row, back in the day.Reply

More realistically, price the GTX660 at MOST 180. I can find 7850's for 160, from XFX no less.

Anandtech, please add an "edit" function to you comments. Also, I want an email when someone responds to me. Then to be able to click a link that takes me directly to that comment, instead of having to plow through 100's of comments.Reply

nvidia prices its solutions at the price it think they are best. If GTX660 sells like cookies, why on earth should they lower the price? To have a red quarter like AMD?And possibly they have quite a few GK106 with just some shaders dead but the memory controller completely working. So those pieces would have to be sold at GTX650 Ti price. With this move they can sell them with a bit of premium price.Consider that for nvidia this new board costed zero, while AMD had to forge a new chip, which has a cost.Reply

It'd be nice to Just Cause 2 in your benchmarks. It has a built in benchmark and everything. Awesome game people will be playing for years, considering they added multi-player. I know you're still working on the benchmark suite, so this is a suggestion I'd really like to see.Reply

its good to keep in mind that open air coolers can be very loud if you dont have a well ventilated case like me. I have a 6850 with an open air cooler and the thing is VERY loud because it gets so crazy hot inside my case. If I had a blower on it, it wouldn't be nearly as loudReply

I think it would be interesting to also post mobile GPU numbers along with these cards. In this field of models there is some relevance related to how the two types would perform in similar games as a comparison.Reply

More data points are usually a good thing, but can I ask what you'd use that for? Since you can't install one in the other, beyond the novelty of knowing how close a midrange desktop card is to a halo mobile part I'm curious to know what you want out of it. It seems like on the mobile side most parts are 2-3 rungs below the desktop part of the same name throughout the lineup.Reply

I base card recs on how long they intend to keep it. On a budget? Ok, get something that will run 1080p for a year or two. 1GB 650 ti or 7790. Idk, I'd have to look at those two to really know between that. But then after that point spend more a 2GB card with a 256bit memory interface. (GTX660 192bit, WTF Nividia?) BUT, if you have some more money and want to keep the card 4 years or more, get the 7850. The 7850 will be faster now, last longer. But whatever card you'd replace the 650 ti with in a year or two for the same price will be even faster than that.

I really don't like where the GPU market is right now. It feels stagnant. Nothing is really a good deal. Like you guys said, there is no sweet spot. The 8800GT was the card to get after the price dropped below 150. Same for the GTX460. Now to get that level of performance they expect you to shell out 220 bucks. Fuck that. I say, for now, either keep your current card or buy the cheapest one you can possibly stomach. This market needs to straighten itself out again.

I'm keeping my GTX460 until I literally can't run games anymore. Don't really care if I have to turn off AA in new titles. Neither company has given me a reason to upgrade. Sub 200 used to be competitive.Reply

Well.. generally speaking the 660 and the 7870 are currently enjoying the sweet spot. Neither card breaks the bank and the trade off in the +$300 range isn't so great to be a game breaker.

The 460 was a $240 card when it launched and both of the ones I mentioned can be had for $220 if you look around.. (not including mail in rebates etc or game bundles). On average their 70% faster than 460 but over the past few years there's been a focus on loading temperatures, power consumption, and other features.. which is something that got kick-started around the time of the 460. Right now it's not giant leaps forward but rather, several steps to the side with a few steps forward in performance.Reply

The 7850 is a 10% larger die. So with all things being equal you can expect roughly 10% more performance. Both chips contain significant fused off sections but the amount that is fused off is roughly the same in percentage terms.

The 7850 at stock is leaving an awful lot of performance on the table. You can tell this just by looking at the power consumption. Overclock the 7850 until its power consumption matches this new nvidia card, and how much performance differential are we now talking about? Well over 10% I'm sure...

The 650 Ti Boost is clearly more aggressively timed and configured, to squeeze out more dollars out of the enthusiast's pocket and into Nvidia's. The fact that the review doesnt really mention any of this is kind of surprising. I would say the 7850 is a better deal, based on the assumption that it has more overclocking overhead. Given the same 28nm process vs the difference in die sizes, that is surely a safe assumption.Reply

7850 doesn't have larger die. Pitcairn is quoted as 212mm^2 whereas gk106 is actually 221mm^2 (though the difference might be just be measuring differently, i.e. including the empty space at the edges or not if those are official, not measured, figures). Pitcairn does have 10% more transistors though (I guess for whatever reason amd could pack them more densely overall).But yes pitcairn is faster than gk106 overall. The reason the gtx660 loses to hd7870 but the gtx650ti boost is very close to hd7850 is of course that hd7850 is a hd7870 with 20% less shader units and 14% less clocks, whereas the 650ti boost is a 660 with 20% less shader units but same clocks. And yes this shows in overclocking potential and perf/w.Reply

Nice card. Okay, the power draw is a bit of a downside, meaning we've got a 680-7970-esque comparison again between the 7850 and 650 Ti Boost where the former performs a little better in general whilst using less power, however considering the gap to the 660 isn't that big, is it worth the extra money?

I can definitely see people buying these; that extra 1GB will certainly help in time.Reply

yeah, but the $$$ of a 660 is dropping every week, i just dont really see the point of the 650 ti when you have the 650 and 660 and they all have overclocked versions as well. a few places have the 2 gig 660 for $199.00Reply

Is it just me thinking the 1GB model might be a bad idea given that these cards with the 192bit memory bus have asymetrical memory placement. The card only has 768MB of the memory at full bandwidth while the last 256MB will only give a 3rd of the bandwidth. (it's the same with the 2GB card but there 1.5GB has full bandwidth.) 768MB is not much with todays standards. Looking forward to the test showing how much that will impact on performance.Reply

It's absurd, just like the AMD 1 GB card that was just announced. I've read that Skyrim with high resolution textures needs 2 GB at minimum and I doubt most people consider Skyrim a high-end game.Reply

The high resolution texture pack didn't really affect memory usage that much when I installed it. It was below 1GB both before and after. That's at 2560x1600, no AA. Maybe with mods it's a different story, but I think if you're trying to show where 1GB hits a wall, you'd be better off starting with a different game.Reply

Personally I'd think it would make more sense to just have a 1.5GB card (at say right between the 149$ of the 1GB model and the 169$ of the 2GB model). All the same performance characteristics as the 2GB model (as you say the those asymmetric configurations are a little dubious or at least suspect anyway) while being cheaper. But marketing doesn't like 1.5GB cards (and as intended competitor of 7850 2GB of course "looks" much better).Reply

How about Performance per dollar(retail) comparison for these very similarly spec'd cards?Make up some metric for 3d games(dx9/10/11), encoding/decoding, OpenCL, etcBecause a lot of games are CPU intensive, for potential buyers, FPS comparison on a specific benchmarking setup is not going to reflect equally in real life.Also if a game can run 60+min. fps & maybe 75fps avg., then the card is as good as it can get for average people. This comparison proves X is better than Y when used with top of the line CPU Mobo RAM combo, but thats it. Many don't go for $2000+ gaming computer setup and put sub $170 GPU in it. What about overclocking potential? It's like comparing non-K cpu to unlocked one (just to put it in a perspective)Reply

Still, the game list is quite obsolete.It is not time to replace Crysis: warhead with Crysis3 and Dirt: Showdown with Dirt3?And adding Skyrim? Last Tomb Raider?Gamers would like to know how today games run on these cards, not only if one GPU is faster than another playing ancient games with obsolete engines.

This thing has already been pointed out during Titan's review. There someone suggested that games choice has been made to review games that are better on AMD rather than nvidia GPUs.However, no answer was made, either to give reasons on why so many old obsolete games or whether the list was going to be changed/enlarged.Still, new games are not considered for no apparent reason.After having spent so many efforts in upgrading the site's appearance, which I like very much, it would be nice also to spend a bit of time to make a new game benchmark suite. It's 2013 and many games have been published after Crysis: warhead and Dirt: showdown.Thanks in advanceReply

We'll be adding two more games next month (or whenever I can find the time to validate them). Crysis: Warhead isn't going anywhere since it's our one legacy title for comparing DX10 cards to. And DiRT: Showdown is newer than DiRT 3, not older. It was Showdown that we replaced 3 with. Skyrim was also removed, since it's badly CPU limited on higher-end cards.Reply

Seems a little disingenuous to avoid comparisons to its direct competitor, the7790, which it handily beats and has better frame delivery times. It wasn't designed to go against the 7850, and you guys know that.Reply

The above conclusion should be revised as "the best card is going to be the card+power_supply+cooling_solution you can afford."

I would like a gddr5 card <=$200 which can play latest games at 1080p at the max settings allowed by budget. But I dont want to screw-up my entire pc due to wrong choice of Power Supply or Cooling system/case.

I am sure this has been discussed somewhere before, if not can Anand and his team create a bench / post article to analyse the playable settings of different gddr5 cards along with the additional investment required in terms of case & power supply, esp from a budget gamer point of view - a person for whom it is nice to be able to game, but actually uses the pc mostly for browsing facebook and doing office work.Reply

They've already got up to 3 letters for prefixes (but always use the same GTX on any card half-interesting for actual 3D work), 100 different numbers in each generation, now an additional suffix "Ti". Yet that's still not enough, we need another suffix...

This may very understandably not be a big consideration for many people, but this card appeals to me a great deal as I am interested in running a Steam Linux Box, and the AMD drivers are currently in an atrocious state for linux. I overall think the AMD cards are more compelling for the price right now, but this is a decently priced nVidia solution.Reply

guys,I am going to build custom gaming pc. And I Have selected this card for my pc.Can you suggest me other compatible hardware requirement for this,e.g.MotherBoard,PSU,Processor,Case,monitor??lower price will be good.Reply